[Editors] MIT: Lack of fuel may limit US nuclear power expansion

[Elizabeth Thomson]

MIT News Office
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Room 11-400
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA  02139-4307
Phone: 617-253-2700
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/www

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MIT: Lack of fuel may limit US nuclear power expansion
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For Immediate Release
TUESDAY, MAR. 20, 2007
Contact: Elizabeth A. Thomson, MIT News Office
Phone: 617-258-5402
Email: thomson at mit.edu

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Limited supplies of fuel for nuclear power plants 
may thwart the renewed and growing interest in nuclear energy in the 
United States and other nations, says an MIT expert on the industry.

Over the past 20 years, safety concerns dampened all aspects of 
development of nuclear energy: No new reactors were ordered and there 
was investment neither in new uranium mines nor in building 
facilities to produce fuel for existing reactors.  Instead, the 
industry lived off commercial and government inventories, which are 
now nearly gone. worldwide, uranium production meets only about 65 
percent of current reactor requirements.

That shortage of uranium and of processing facilities worldwide 
leaves a gap between the potential increase in demand for nuclear 
energy and the ability to supply fuel for it, said Dr. Thomas Neff, a 
research affiliate at MIT's Center for International Studies.

"Just as large numbers of new reactors are being planned, we are only 
starting to emerge from 20 years of underinvestment in the production 
capacity for the nuclear fuel to operate them. There has been a 
nuclear industry myopia; they didn't take a long-term view," Neff 
said. For example, only a few years ago uranium inventories were 
being sold at $10 per pound; the current price is $85 per pound.

Neff has been giving a series of talks at industry meetings and 
investment conferences around the world about the nature of the fuel 
supply problem and its implications for the so-called "nuclear 
renaissance," pointing out both the sharply rising cost of nuclear 
fuel and the lack of capacity to produce it.

Currently, much of the uranium used by the United States is coming 
from mines in such countries as Australia, Canada, Namibia, and, most 
recently, Kazakhstan. Small amounts are mined in the western United 
States, but the United States is largely reliant on overseas 
supplies. The United States also relies for half its fuel on Russia 
under a "swords to ploughshares" deal that Neff originated in 1991. 
This deal is converting about 20,000 Russian nuclear weapons to fuel 
for U.S. nuclear power plants, but it ends in 2013, leaving a 
substantial supply gap for the United States.

Further, China, India, and even Russia have plans for massive 
deployments of nuclear power and are trying to lock up supplies from 
countries on which the United States has traditionally relied. As a 
result, the United States could be the "last one to buy, and it could 
pay the highest prices, if it can get uranium at all," Neff said. 
"The take-home message is that if we're going to increase use of 
nuclear power, we need massive new investments in capacity to mine 
uranium and facilities to process it."

Mined uranium comes in several forms, or isotopes.  For starting a 
nuclear chain reaction in a reactor, the only important isotope is 
uranium-235, which accounts for JUST 7 out of 1000 atoms in the mined 
product.  To fuel a nuclear reactor, the concentration of uranium-235 
has to be increased to 40 to 50 out of 1000 atoms.  This is done by 
separating isotopes in an enrichment plant to achieve the higher 
concentration.

As Neff points out, reactor operators could increase the amount of 
fuel made from a given amount of natural uranium by buying more 
enrichment services to recover more uranium-235 atoms. Current 
enrichment capacity is enough to recover only about 4 out of 7 
uranium-235 atoms. Limited uranium supplies could be stretched if 
industry could recover 5 or 6 of these atoms, but there is not enough 
processing capacity worldwide to do so.

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